Prior to version 5.0, MySQL could only use one index per table in a given query without any exceptions; folks that didn’t understand this limitation would often have tables with lots of single-column indexes on columns which commonly appeared in their WHERE clauses, and they’d wonder why the EXPLAIN plan for a given SELECT would [...]
Fishing with dynamite, brought to you by the randgen and dbqp
I tend to speak highly of the random query generator as a testing tool and thought I would share a story that shows how it can really shine. At our recent dev team meeting, we spent approximately 30 minutes of hack time to produce test cases for 3 rather hard to duplicate bugs. Of course, [...]
Shard-Query EC2 images available
Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here [...]
Shard-Query turbo charges Infobright community edition (ICE)
Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to [...]
Quickly preloading Innodb tables in the buffer pool
In the previous post I mentioned a way I use to preload Clustered Index (data) for Innodb tables. Though I thought this topic would benefit from a bit more information. But lest first start with feature request for Innodb Team: All ways I mention here are hacks and they can’t be as efficient as native [...]
Efficient Boolean value storage for Innodb Tables
Sometimes you have the task of storing multiple of boolean values (yes/now or something similar) in the table and if you get many columns and many rows you may want to store them as efficient way as possible. For MyISAM tables you could use BIT(1) fields which get combined together for efficient storage:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 | CREATE TABLE `bbool` ( `b1` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b2` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b3` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b4` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b5` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b6` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b7` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b8` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b9` bit(1) NOT NULL, `b10` bit(1) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MyISAM mysql> show table status like 'bbool' \G *************************** 1. row *************************** Name: bbool Engine: MyISAM Version: 10 Row_format: Fixed Rows: 10 Avg_row_length: 7 Data_length: 70 Max_data_length: 1970324836974591 Index_length: 1024 Data_free: 0 Auto_increment: NULL Create_time: 2008-04-24 00:41:01 Update_time: 2008-04-24 00:45:40 Check_time: NULL Collation: latin1_swedish_ci Checksum: NULL Create_options: Comment: 1 row in set (0.00 sec) |
Updated msl (microslow) patch, installation walk-through!
For a couple of months there have been no updates to our msl patch, however recently I managed some time to change this. The functionality was extended a little bit and what’s even more important the patch is available for all the recent MySQL releases. To remind anyone who has not yet come across this [...]
Using VIEW to reduce number of tables used
Many Open Source software solutions use database per user (or set of tables per user) which starts to cause problems if it is used on massive scale (blog hosting, forum hosting etc), resulting of hundreds of thousands if not millions of tables per server which can become really inefficient. It is especially inefficient with Innodb [...]
ORDER BY … LIMIT Performance Optimization
Suboptimal ORDER BY implementation, especially together with LIMIT is often the cause of MySQL Performance problems. Here is what you need to know about ORDER BY … LIMIT optimization to avoid these problems ORDER BY with LIMIT is most common use of ORDER BY in interactive applications with large data sets being sorted. On many [...]
SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through
Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

